Atau Tanaka

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File:Atau Tanaka - Myogram.jpg

Atau Tanaka performing Myogram

Atau Tanaka is a composer and performer in the field of technology and music. He was born in Tokyo, Japan, and raised in New England in the United States.

Musical Education

Tanaka attended Harvard University, graduating in 1985 with an AB in Physical Sciences. He studied electronic music with the Chinese-Russian composer, Ivan Tcherepnin., brother of modular synthesizer designer Serge. In the Harvard Electronic Music Studios, Tanaka trained on Scully 2 track open reel tape recorders, a Buchla 200 and Serge analogue modular synthesizers. Upon graduation in 1985, he aided Tcherepnin in wiring up a second room, the digital studio, with early Macintosh 512k with Total Music MIDI sequencer, Opcode Systems editor/librarian, and Blank Software Soundlab, audio editing software, Ensoniq Mirage sampler, Casio CZ101 waveshaping synthesizer, and Yamaha DX7 FM synthesizer.

Tcherepnin invited John Cage to give the Norton Lectures in 1988. Tanaka attended these lectures, listening to Cage read his mesostics in Payne Hall at Harvard. He was invited by Tcherepnin for dinner at his home with Cage, and met Cage, who arrived at the dinner with a basket of mushrooms. Tanaka would meet Cage again in 1989 when the mezzo-soprano, Marilyn Degeggi hosted Cage for a festival in his honor at the Swarthmore Arts Center in Maryland.

After graduating from Harvard, Tanaka moved to the Baltimore/Washington DC area. He enrolled at Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University in 1986, in a dual BM degree in Composition & Recording Arts, a programme inspired by the German tonmeister system. He studied composition with the New York composer Morris Cotel, recording engineering with Alan Kefauver, and computer music with Geoffrey Wright. It was in studying the Cmix computer music language in the Peabody Computer Music studio that Tanaka got his first Arpanet account on the .mil domain on a server based at the Aberbeen military base in Maryland. Through this, and the Performing Artists Network (PAN) bulletin board service (BBS) systems, Tanaka first made contact with computer music researchers at Stanford's CCRMA and software developers like David Zicarelli.

Tanaka then began his doctoral studies at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989. He studied with John Chowning, Julius Smith, Max Mathews, John Pierce, Chris Chafe, and Mark Applebaum. He graduated with a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Computer Music Composition, in 2004, with his thesis piece, Prométhée Numérique/Frankenteins Netz, a hoerspiel for radio and Internet. In the third year of his PhD, in 1992, he was awarded the Prix de Paris by the Faculty of Humanities to spend a year in Paris at the Cité Internationale des Arts. He carried out research at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Musique/Acoustique (IRCAM) at the Centre Pompidou. There he met Miller Puckette, Zack Settel, Cort Lippe, and Bennett Smith. Following the one year award, Tanaka stayed on in Paris, and began working in the Pedagogy department at IRCAM under Jean-Baptiste Barriere. In this time, David Zicarelli worked for one year at IRCAM porting the NeXT ISPW FTS system to Apple's PowerPC-based CPU systems, creating MaxMSP.

Music

While at Harvard, Tanaka formed the band, Trashart, with Morley Robertson, Bruce Bowell, David Majka, and David Manier. Tanaka played electric guitar. They recorded one album, Ikagen, in 1984, recorded in the 24 track studio, Downtown Recorders, in Boston. The record was distributed by New Music Distribution Service, a distribution company in New York founded by Carla Bley.

In 1990, Tanaka attended the Cyber Arts International festival in Los Angeles, and met Hugh Lusted and Ben Knapp, inventors of the BioMuse biosignal MIDI instrument system, an early physiological interface. He became an advocate of the BioMuse and premiered the piece, Kagami, at Stanford University's Frost Amphitheatre in 1991.

In 1992, Tanaka was invited to perform the BioMuse by Günter Christmann and Elke Schipper in Paris at the Etablissement Phonographiques de l’Est (EPE), where Isabelle Piechaczyk was curator. There, he met Erik Minkinnen of Sister Iodine.

In 1993, he met for a second time, Nicolas Collins at IRCAM. He had earlier met Collins, in 1988, performing his Trombone Propelled Electronics in Cologne at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) organised by Clarence Barlow. He had also met Zbigniew Karkowski and Johannes Goebel there. Collins invited Tanaka to perform at STEIM in Amsterdam.

Karkowski attended Tanaka's concert at STEIM as well as a performance Tanaka gave in Amsterdam in 1993 with the French radical VR group, Les Virtualistes at a Dutch cyberculture festival organised by Luc Sala. Tanaka also worked with Les Virtualistes in an early network concert using ISDN digital telephone lines to connect the Sonar Festival in Barcelona with the Algerian guitarist Camel Zekri performing in Paris (). He would go on to play Sonar two more times, in 1997, and 2004.

Karkowski and Tanaka formed Sensorband in 1993 with the Dutch artist Edwin van der Heide. They first performed at the Sonimage festival at the Tacheles squat in Berlin, organised by Karina Mertin. Sensorband toured for 10 years through Europe, Japan, Canada, and the U.S. Sensorband were artists in residence in 1997 in Tokyo at the NTT InterCommunications Center and premiered a performance piece, Extended Thrill in collaboration with the duo, Granular Synthesis. They took part in an orchestra of Japanese noise musicians programmed at London Southbank as part of John Peel's Meltdown. This included artists like KK Null, Merzbow, Masahiro Miwa, Kasper Toeplitz, Tetsuo Furudate. A live recording was released on the Dutch label, Staalplaat.

Sensorband played Sonic Acts 1993 at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 1996 with their monumental musical instrument, Sound Net, and Sonar 1997, captured in Iara Lee’s documentary film, Modulations. In this film, in addition to Sensorband at Sonar, Tanaka and Karkowski appear in a gig at 20,000 Volts in Tokyo alongside Merzbow. This resulted in a record contract for Lee's label, Caipirinha Music, for whom Tanaka released his solo album, Biorhythms in 2000.

Tanaka moved from Tokyo back to Paris in 2001. In 2003, with Cécile Babiole and Laurent Dailleau, he formed his second trio, Sensors_Sonics_Sights. Tanaka continued to perform on the BioMuse, while Dailleau played Theremin and Babiole performed live visuals using Jitter controlled by hand movements on ultra-sonic sensors. S_S_S toured for five years, to 2008 including concerts at Sonar (Sonarama) 2004, New York Electronic Arts Festival, and sk-interfaces at FACT Liverpool.

In 2008, Tanaka worked with Zoviet France and Matt Want from the band, Stock, Hausen & Walkman on a commission from Honor Harger of the AV Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne to recreate John Cage's Variations VII. The piece was premiered at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and was restaged in 2009 at the Rencontres Internationales at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and in 2010 at Dock Workstation Sommercamp at Radialsystem Berlin.

In 2009, Tanaka formed a duo with Adam Parkinson (aka Dane Law) performing 4 Hands iPhone, running PureData using the RJDJ system and Nobuyasu Sakonda's granular synthesis on early iOS devices. Adam & Atau toured until 2012 including Electron Festival Geneva, Mois Multi Quebec, BEAM London, Audio Arts Krakow, and Cafe Oto.

Tanaka has performed solo with electromyogram (EMG) signals, switching from the BioMuse to the Thalmic Labs Myo in 2015. He has toured with the performance, Myogram, performing at ZKM, Peter Gabriel's WOMAD festival, and Roulette in New York City.

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